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Laurel Pop Festival
The Laurel Pop Festival was a music festival held at the Laurel Race Course in Laurel, Maryland on July 11–12, 1969. Line-Up July 11, 1969 Buddy Guy, Al Kooper, Jethro Tull, Johnny Winter, Edwin Hawkins & Led Zeppelin July 12, 1969 Jeff Beck, Ten Years After, Sly and the Family Stone, The Mothers of Invention, Savoy Brown & The Guess Who In the summer of 1969, thousands of young people gathered together to attend a festival showcasing many of the greatest musicians of their generation. Huddled around each other in the mud, these counterculture youth engaged in a capstone event to the rebellious and liberating 1960’s. This event was Maryland’s Laurel Pop Festival. Indeed, little over a month before Woodstock, the Laurel Race Course featured its own lineup of impressive and influential rock and pop acts over two nights, the 11th and 12th of July. Though certainly overshadowed by the ever-famous Woodstock and ever-infamous Altamont, the Laurel Pop Festival was special in its own right. Featuring a lineup that the Laurel Leader called a “who’s who” in pop music, the two day event was the invention of local promoters Elzie Street and James Scott, who teamed up with George Wein, founder of the famed Newport Folk Festival. The Laurel concert was originally intended as a companion to Wein’s Laurel Jazz Festival, which had run annually since 1967. Shifting tastes and audience expectations made a new focus on pop music to be a profitable move. In the leadup to the show, several papers, including The Evening Star, Washington Post, and Baltimore Sun ran numerous advertisements. Tickets were available at local retail outlets (a foreign concept today), including Sears and Montgomery Ward among others. Running between $4.75 and $10 (roughly $32-$66 in 2017), the profits exceeded the $55,000 cost of the performers by roughly $30,000. The first night of the festival on July 11th was an unqualified success, featuring giants like Johnny Winter, Jethro Tull, and finally, Led Zeppelin, who performed some songs from their unreleased second album, such as “What is and What Should Never Be” and “The Lemon Song”. The second night though had its share of problems. The 12th of July was a rainy evening. As a result, the night’s first act, The Guess Who, were delayed by two hours, a setback that would cause further problems as the night drew on. Yet despite this, the audience was largely in good spirits and in greater numbers than the night before. A notable but forgotten moment in rock history, the Jeff Beck Group played one of its final concerts (if not final) with its original lineup featuring Rod Stewart on the Laurel Pop Festival’s second night. Though scheduled to play Woodstock in August, they never did. Another highlight was Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, who played a characteristically absurd set that made “ribald mockery of all things serious”. Still, Zappa’s technical proficiency shone through, with one journalist remarking “he had a look on his face as if trying to say ‘Look at me, I’m in good full control of the music; not one note got out of hand.'” By the time Zappa’s ten-man “freakshow” left the stage, it was already 1:10 AM with two more acts to go. Pushed back by the rain, the festival’s later set-times brought on unforeseen problems. Now beginning to resemble Altamont more than Woodstock, in the cold wee-hours of the morning, concert goers began burning their wooden folding chairs into large bonfires to keep warm. Following a lengthy set-up time and an announcement saying “the management has asked you please not to burn the chairs”, Sly & the Family Stone took the stage around 2:00 AM. With fires still burning in the race-course infield, the soul-funk group performed its hit “I Want to Take You Higher” among other songs, but their set was cut short. Prince George’s County police and venue management had had enough of the raucous music echoing through Laurel (which was by all journalists’ accounts, far too loud), as well as the continued bonfires. The group was abruptly directed off-stage, as one attendee purportedly heaved a chair at the stage-hands. The festival’s final act, The Savoy Brown Blues Band, never went on. Whether or not the end of the festival was truly as chaotic as some sources claimed is unclear. In any case, concert promoter Elzie Street did his best to downplay the uproar: “There were only about 40 or 50 chairs burned. The way it appeared on TV, it looked like chaos. When we looked at the books, it was maybe $100 worth of damage … These kids will go as far as you let ‘em, but if you tell ‘em to stop, they will”. When it came to the music, a young Carl Bernstein (who would later played a crucial role in reporting Watergate) was not so impressed. Though complementary of Zappa, Al Kooper, and Johnny Winter, he was not moved by the rest as he wrote in the Post: “Jethro Tull, Jeff Beck, Ten Years After and Led Zeppelin all were widely acclaimed by the audience and have best-selling albums, facts that make it unpleasant to contemplate where rock is going”. In retrospect, it’s safe to say that Bernstein’s pessimism was unfounded as many of the groups that graced the Laurel stage enjoyed tremendous success. However, with Woodstock happening only a month after, the Laurel Pop Festival was soon buried in its shadow. The damages and roudiness put off mangement, and the plan of annual festivals was tossed aside and never revisited. Still, it was a special night in rock music that the D.C area should be proud to own.